Kerry in Israel to Push for Gaza Cease-Fire

By Anne Gearan, Sudarsan Raghavan, Ruth Eglash, The Washington Post

23 July 14

ecretary of State John F. Kerry claimed some progress Wednesday toward halting the Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed in Gaza, now in its third week, as Israel held a funeral for one of two Americans killed fighting for the Jewish state.

“We have certainly made some steps forward,” Kerry told reporters as he began a day of discussions in Israel and the West Bank aimed at a quick end to the fighting. “There is still work to be done.”

More than 650 Palestinians have been killed and 4,000 wounded in Israeli airstrikes and artillery salvos over the last 16 days. There was especially heavy shelling east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip and in Gaza City on Wednesday morning.

Twenty-nine Israeli soldiers have been reported killed in fighting with Hamas and other Palestinian militant factions. Two Israeli civilians and a Thai guest workers have perished in rocket or mortar attacks launched from Gaza. Wednesday’s funeral for U.S. citizen Max Steinberg, 24, from Woodland Hills, Calif., was attended by an estimated 30,000 Israelis.

Kerry met first with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who has been shuttling among Arab states and Israel seeking an immediate end to violence he has called “atrocious.”

Ban thanked Kerry for his parallel efforts, but neither diplomat offered any details of their work or an estimate of when the fighting might end.

“We do not have much time to wait and lose,” Ban said.

Kerry went next to the West Bank headquarters of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is trying to mediate the crisis on behalf of Hamas. As titular leader of all the Palestinians, Abbas is in a difficult and ever-weaker position the longer the fighting goes on, and the United States hopes to somehow strengthen his hand.

The United States and Israel consider Hamas a terrorist group, and U.S. officials are barred from direct meetings or negotiations with the militants. Abbas sought to bridge a seven-year schism with the Hamas faction earlier this spring, but the unified government he formed is now blamed by Israel and others for stoking the current crisis.

Following his hour-long session in Ramallah, Kerry said there has been “some progress” over the past day.

Kerry praised Abbas as a leader committed to nonviolence, telling reporters after the meeting that Abbas “has been working with of all the interested groups and parties and encouraging people to do the responsible thing, which is to come to the table.”

Kerry never mentioned Hamas, which has adherents even in the Fatah-led West Bank, but he made what sounded like a direct appeal to the militants and their supporters.

“Sometimes it’s very satisfying for people to see the immediate impact of the violence,” Kerry said, “but it doesn’t take you to a solution.”

Kerry also made a broad appeal for peace.

“The people in the Palestinian territories, the people in Israel, are all living under the threat or reality of immediate violence,” he said. “This needs to end, for everybody. We need to find a way forward that works, and it’s not violence.”

At an emergency meeting in Geneva, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said that Israeli strikes in Gaza raise concerns. “There seems to be a strong possibility that international law has been violated, in a manner that could amount to war crimes,” she said, according to accounts in the Israeli media.

Israeli diplomats and military spokesmen charge that Hamas has been indiscriminately bombing Israeli cities for weeks and that the Gaza militants have stored weapons and fired at Israelis from mosques, schools and hospitals.

Kerry’s arrival in Tel Aviv on a U.S. Air Force plane was not restricted by a Federal Aviation Administration warning against commercial airline travel to the Israel’s Ben Gurion International airport.

Stunned by the closing of its gateway to the world, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had phoned Kerry to appeal for a resumption of U.S. flights to Israel, underscoring fears here that the country might be labeled a war zone and suffer damage to its tourism, high-tech and investment sectors.

In light of the FAA warning against flying to Israel’s main airport near Tel Aviv, where a Hamas-fired rocket hit a house in a nearby town Tuesday, Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz announced early Wednesday that Israel would open an additional airport in the country’s south. Ovda airport was closed as a commercial airport several years ago and sits close to Israel’s southernmost town, Eilat, on the Red Sea near the border with Egypt.

It was not immediately clear whether U.S. and European flights would agree to land their jets at Ovda airport.

The Israel Airports Authority said Tuesday that 80 flights to and from Israel were canceled in light of the FAA decision, leaving thousands of Israelis stranded around the world and thousands more visitors stuck in Israel.

The suspension of flights by all American and some major European carriers reflected the ability of the militant Palestinian Islamist group to affect Israel’s economy with its rockets, one of which struck within a mile of the international airport near Tel Aviv on Tuesday.

The U.S. State Department sought to calm Israeli anger, explaining in a statement that the ban was meant only to protect American citizens. The statement was an apparent effort to prevent the measure from being seen as U.S. pressure on Israel to agree to Hamas demands.

Despite a diplomatic push by Kerry and other world leaders, there was no trace of progress Tuesday toward reviving an Egyptian truce proposal rejected by Hamas a week ago or amending it to make it more attractive to Hamas, as the United States is quietly urging. Israel accepted the proposal, but Hamas said it met none of the group’s demands.

Those demands, conveyed by Hamas leaders to Abbas on Tuesday in Doha, Qatar, include the end of Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza and the release of several hundred Hamas prisoners who were rearrested by Israel in a crackdown on Hamas last month in the West Bank after three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and killed.

Israel’s military announced that two more Israeli soldiers were killed Tuesday, bringing the Israeli armed forces’ death toll to 29 since Thursday — the largest number of Israeli troop deaths since a 2006 war with Lebanon.

Throughout Tuesday, Israel continued to pound Hamas targets in Gaza with airstrikes and from naval vessels off the coast, while Hamas sent a steady barrage of rockets into Israel. One projectile struck a house in Yehud, in central Israel near Ben Gurion International Airport.

The attack injured one person, but it prompted the FAA to ban U.S. flights to and from Ben Gurion for 24 hours starting Tuesday afternoon. Airlines including Delta, US Airways, United, Air France and Lufthansa suspended flights.

In Gaza, Hamas fighting units are proving to be tenacious, trained and sometimes deadly. According to an Israeli military account released Tuesday, a firefight between members of an elite paratrooper unit and Gaza militants left one paratrooper dead and several wounded. Hamas lost seven fighters in the exchange.

The United Nations says more than 70 percent of the casualties in Gaza are civilians, including many children. Israel says it has killed as many as 180 militants.

Also Tuesday, a senior Israeli military official, speaking to journalists in Tel Aviv, suggested that there was a possibility that a missing soldier, Oron Shaul, could have been captured alive by Hamas or another militant faction in Gaza.

Shaul was one of seven Israelis inside an aging armored personnel carrier (APC) pushing Sunday into the Shijaiyah enclave of East Gaza, a Hamas stronghold peppered with some of the tunnel networks that Israel says it entered Gaza to destroy. Their vehicle appeared to have a technical malfunction or was somehow prevented from moving forward, the military official said.

“It was stuck in the middle of the action, and it’s possible that some of the guys got out to fix it or tie it up to another APC,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in accordance with military procedure.

As the vehicle stood stuck on the road, he said, Hamas militants struck it with an antitank missile, possibly causing the fuel tank to explode, blowing up and killing all of the soldiers who were inside. It was unclear, the official said, whether Shaul was inside or outside the vehicle when it was hit.

The bodies of the soldiers were burned beyond recognition, and tests had to be conducted to identify the remains. Six of the seven soldiers were identified, the military said.

“For the time being, no parts of his [Shaul’s] body have been found among the ruins of the APC,” the senior Israeli military official said.

Later Sunday, a Hamas spokesman said in a televised statement that a soldier named Shaul Aron is “a prisoner now” and displayed what he said was Shaul’s photo ID and serial number.

It is not clear that Israel is ready to halt the offensive. Senior Israeli politicians have vowed not leave Gaza until Israel has destroyed all the Hamas tunnels stretching from Gaza into Israel. Hamas has also pledged to continue to fight.

On Tuesday, addressing reporters, Kerry was deferential to Egypt, stressing that his role is to assist the longtime Arab power broker as it leads the cease-fire efforts. Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry thanked Kerry for the U.S. backing but stressed that the Egyptian proposal had received “wide support” on its own.

A senior State Department official, though, later said a truce is not immediately at hand.

“Right now our focus is on stopping the rocket fire so that we can begin a serious negotiation on the key issues,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe Kerry’s objectives.